Two nights after her return Ranata went to the opera-house of Budapest
for the last time. Much to her chagrin she was ten minutes late.
Royalty has its privileges and virtues. It may exercise the courtesy
of promptness without loss of prestige, and no men and women the world
over sit in an opera-box with the same ease and dignity and grace. From
childhood they are trained to stand and sit without moving or betraying
fatigue, and if the frequent necessity adds to the sum of their mortal
expiations, it makes them as decorative, when properly dressed, as
their ancient palaces and historical pageants.
But for one princess the tenor of the day had been disturbed. A
sleepless night had resulted in an involuntary nap at three o’clock
in the afternoon. Her drive had been late, and she had returned home
so short a time before the early dinner that her maids had detained
her through half of it. She regretted having announced her intention
to attend the opera, but it was a _première_, and she would have been
expected in any case.
The large house was crowded with the gay aristocracy of Budapest,
and with many who, if not so highly placed, could dress as well,
and contribute to the general effect of brilliant beauty: an effect
which owed more than the women would have admitted to the varied and
magnificent uniforms of the officers. Orders glittered on black coats
as on colored, and every woman wore her abundant store of jewels. But
fans and heads were moving restlessly. Where was their princess? It was
the _première_ in Hungary of Massenet’s “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,”
and this music-loving people were eager for the curtain to rise.
At ten minutes past seven that mysterious electric current that
announces the coming of royalty to the sensitive faculties of Europeans
flew over the house; bringing it to its feet, and lifting its eyes to
the gala box facing the stage, as if manipulated by a spring.
Ranata, accompanied by Sarolta and Alexandra, her Grand Chamberlain,
Prince Illehazy, and Count Zrinyi, entered and advanced to the front
of the box, acknowledging the waving of handkerchiefs and clapping of
hands, the well-bred “_Élyens_” and “_Vivats_” and “_Hochs_.” She wore
white velvet, a small crown of pearls, and many pearls on her neck.
For the first time she showed the wear of too much thought and loss
of sleep; she was pale rather than white, and her eyes were listless.
During the few moments that she stood there, however, while the band
played the national anthem, her guests on either side of her, the
admiring house saw only the perfect carriage of her form and head, the
undimmed brilliancy of her hair, and that most rare combination of
beauty and majesty.
The anthem finished, the royal party took their seats, the opera
began. Ranata kept her eyes resolutely bent upon the stage, but
although she felt and had been severely drilled in music, hers was the
imagination which escapes control under the influence of the only art
that penetrates to the key-notes of being. The spell of the limpid
semi-religious music swirled round her like a soft tide. She saw far
beyond the poor juggler apologizing to the Virgin for desecrating her
name that he might gratify a heartless rabble and keep his wretched
body from starving; and if she forbade her eyes to wander over the
house, every nerve told her that Fessenden Abbott was not there.
She had asked him to leave Hungary immediately upon his return to
Budapest, and she knew that if he had not done so--he must await
important telegrams--he would not come to the palace, nor to any
gathering where she was sure to be. And to attend the opera except in
her train would have excited the comment both wished to avoid.
Whether he had gone or not she did not know, for she would not ask
Alexandra; if indeed her friend knew, for the brother and sister had
said good-bye at the station in Budapest. Ranata, who had been gifted
with no greater measure of consistency than the rest of her sex, had
hoped to see him while driving, while entering the opera-house, to
receive from him some swift involuntary token that he was thinking of
her as persistently as she was of him.
For she thought of little else, and she was aghast at the power of
love to defy the will. The emotional struggle had induced a physical
lassitude she had never known before. That morning she had risen with
the thought, “Am I going to send for him to-day? Am I? _Am I?_” And the
question had risen again and again, acquainting her for the first time
with the insolent defiance of the fixed idea to the higher qualities
of the brain. She had had experience of the dual entity in the mental
household before, but never so complete a sense of division, nor of
possession by faculties which seemed to have forced an entrance into
her mind rather than have risen from its depths.
She had not sent for him, however, and she hardly knew whether she
had refrained through the exercise of a will which appeared to sit in
a corner smiling with amusement, from pride, a sense of futility, or
merely because the argument in her mind had not finished in time. In
any case she felt so far from her imperious self that she was almost as
alarmed as she was unhappy. She was filled with a dull abhorrence of
the idea of living the rest of her life on the surface of her nature,
as she was attempting to live it to-night. For what else was left her?
Did she become queen, and none knew better than she that it was but
a possibility among a thousand opposing forces, she could occupy her
brain with routine as her father did; but in a constitutional monarchy,
particularly in one as jealous of its rights as Hungary, she would
exercise so little power that, with her merciless clarity of vision,
she must soon know herself for what she was, an ornamental figure-head.
It would be the pride of the Hungarians to have the most beautiful
queen in Europe, delight the abundant enthusiasm and the loyal instinct
of their natures to love their elected sovereign; and they would value
her the more for a charm which must unite all factions and preserve
them from internal conflict. They would vote her immense sums to live
as a queen should, to restore to the old palace of Buda its ancient
glories and excite the envy of Europe. All these things she might have,
and she knew them to be toys.
Did she sympathize with the tide of liberty rising in the world, and
nowhere so vigorously as in Hungary? She had put the question from
her again and again, and it had returned as often. Surely he had not
revolutionized her brain to that extent; she must be less than herself
were she unfaithful to the monarchical idea. And yet, when her mind
left Fessenden Abbott it seemed to her that some mysterious force
drew it to the great sullen heart of mankind, brooding eternally on
its birthright of freedom; every instinct of independence, when not
crushed by the tyranny of the Turk or the Russian, still blunted and
pruned in a thousand petty and humiliating ways. Would the socialists
conquer William? And then--when with greater liberty had come their own
adaptation to the unalterable facts of life and human nature--would the
world be better, a more habitable place for mankind in the general? And
was that the destiny of the human race--the happiness of the many, not
the exaltation of the few? That it was a great thought, a grand theory,
she did not pretend to deny. But did she sympathize with it?
While she assured herself contemptuously that she did not, that the
order of the centuries must be best merely because it was, a part of
her brain seemed to her to accept the doctrine, and give itself no
concern to argue. She turned her back upon it. Why argue, indeed?
A month, a few months hence, possibly a year, the influence that
now possessed her would be so far removed that her mind would have
recovered its balance, alien thoughts must have sunk so deep that she
would only unearth them now and again as curiosities. She made up her
mind that if Alexandra did not marry Zrinyi she would put an end to the
intimacy with herself; and it seemed to her, in her present unhappy
condition, that she would be insensible to further sorrow. She should
indeed welcome complete loneliness, barren of outward suggestion. There
could be no doubt of the triumph, in time, of her strong will, of her
absolute fidelity, in thought as in deed, to the lofty station to which
she had been born.
She sighed for her lost superstitions, rather for the superstitions
of her fathers which might have been here had no alien influence
entered her life. How they must sustain the soul of majesty through
its trials, through its loneliness, through the long martyrdom of
its earthly course. There had been times when she had heard the
deep mutter of those ancient ghosts, when for a brief hour they had
risen and possessed her brain. Indeed, there had been hours--usually
when Alexandra’s uncompromising practicality summered in its native
land--when it had seemed to her that in the depths of her soul was
a charnel-house of hideous memories, ambiguous of outline, of old
corruptions, unknown in her life but transmitted with her blood, of
impulses for tyranny and cruelty, and unbridled passions, of lust of
blood, and callous indifference to human suffering. Philip the Second
and Joan the Mad were but two of her illustrious ancestors who might
have sent filtering down the worst traits and impulses which the human
heart is capable of supporting. There had been times when she had
believed that had she been born a century earlier it would have needed
but the circumstances to make her the vilest of women. She could have
reigned with her feet in blood and loved as royal harlots have loved
since Messalina burned her pitch in history. And, she recalled, as
she listened to the soft passionless music of the opera, there had
also been moments when she had regretted that no such life could be
hers--wondered if indeed it had not been.
But it was years now since the last of these obsessions had risen,
five or six, at least. She had acquired great control over herself;
moreover, they had rested impotent under healthy influences; and
assuredly in the company of Fessenden Abbott she could not have evoked
their memory, the ghosts of those old ghosts. Would it not perhaps
be better if she could? Would not even the occasional demoralization
of her spiritual nature be a lesser sin than this treachery to the
divinity in her royal blood? Were she steeped in superstition she
might have known her lover better than she had; but the temptation to
marry him, the persistent disposition to look at life from his point of
view, would never have assailed her for a moment.
Her eyes during this long reverie, interrupted only by an _entr’acte_,
were fixed upon the stage. The surface of her brain had taken its
impression of the interior of the monastery where the starving
mountebank, cursed by the prior for his blasphemy, had been enticed
that he might find absolution in the life of a monk and fill his
stomach daily. The priests and friars in their rich white cassocks, the
brown interior of the monastic room, made a harmonious and insidious
picture, and the despair of the miserable youth while the other
cenobites boasted of the arts--painting, sculpture, poetry, music--with
which they glorified the Virgin, drew tears from many sympathetic eyes.
The juggler and a kindly friar were alone, and the elect was pouring
into the astonished ear of the poor ignoramus the story of the birth of
Christ in a manger, and explaining that the Lady of Sorrows understood
not only Latin, but all languages, and even dialects, and had as
merciful an ear for the outcast as for the king. The mountebank, with
his primitive credulity, his almost maniacal terror under the curse
of the abbot, is a vivid study of superstition in the Middle Ages. As
Ranata’s attention was captured for the moment by the intensity of the
final moments of the act, she found herself envying the simplicity of
a creature as capable, in his primal limitations, of the extremest
satisfaction and happiness as of terror and despair. The second
_entr’acte_ is very short. A few moments after the curtain rises the
impressive double row of friars in their sumptuous cassocks march out
of the chapel to their own solemn music, and the mountebank enters
alone, throws off his monastic robe, and in his costume of a harlequin
offers his juggler’s art to the glorification of the painted Virgin
above the altar. It is a scene almost incredible in its childish
superstition, but so pathetic that in that rapt audience neither Jew
nor Protestant paid his brain the tribute of a smile. Ranata, of all
persons, saw no humor in it, for her mind traversed the history of her
race, and halted suddenly at the memory of Maria Theresia, who had sent
her daughters down alone into the imperial crypt on the eve of their
marriage to pray among the coffins of their ancestors. She recalled how
she herself had sometimes felt an impulse to go down there in the night
and do likewise, that she might satisfy that something in the depths of
her soul so akin to those who had dwelt in the benighted past.
Her attitude suddenly lost its graceful ease. She stiffened and sat
erect as if about to spring; but the eye of the house was focussed
on the stage and she was forgotten. Was not the time come for that
nocturnal pilgrimage? Might not she there, among those four centuries
of her dead, steep herself in that subtle aura of personality which
still must diffuse itself through lead and bronze? Alone there, at
midnight, with but the light of a taper to illumine those motley
hillocks, with the dank odor of death clogging her senses, kneeling
close to the dust and the corruption which had lived so intensely
with the blood that ran in her own veins, must she not recapture her
inherited superstitions, break with the present, absorb once more
the poison of the past? She realized that it was not to satisfy her
sense of kinship with the dead that she should now go to them alone at
midnight, but to revive the lost sense of indissoluble relationship,
of similarities, of the closest likeness of which inherited blood and
brain-cells are capable. She should kneel finally at the foot of
Rudolf’s coffin, and pray there until she was a Hapsburg once more.
Heavy and abnormal as her brain was from fatigue, sleeplessness,
passionate misery of thought, and reaction from the exalted mood of
her last interview with Fessenden, still it seemed to her that it drew
away in modern disgust from the idea that had risen precipitately in
its middle and taken possession. But Ranata clung to that idea as to
her one hope of salvation; and as the Virgin and the angels, which
had appeared in place of the picture above the altar, to reveal the
eternal beauty of simple faith to the indignant priests, were growing
more luminous, and at the same time, so perfect the art, less and less
material, and the poor juggler’s spirit was struggling from its flesh,
she matured the details of her plan; and half an hour later, when she
descended from the carriage in the palace court-yard, she asked Sarolta
to be ready to accompany her to Vienna on the following day.